Two wheels: Claire Armitstead on Brendt Barbur and the Bicycle film festival

Cyclists are eternal optimists. If proof were required, you need only look to the story of Brendt Barbur, founder of the Bicycle film festival, which freewheels into London next weekend for the fourth time.

The California-born actor was cycling in his adopted home, New York, when he was knocked into the path of a bus by a van door. "The bus driver came over and stared at me and didn't say a word. The man in the van didn't say a word. I felt a lack of respect and wanted to do something to advocate bike use, but I didn't know how to do it," he says. Instead of pocketing the compensation and taking to the subway, he decided to put his pay-off to work. "I'm into art, I'm into film, so that's what I did."

The resulting festival roadshow is now in its eighth year and has spread to 15 cities, from New York to Tokyo and Sydney to Zurich. It caters for an international cycling community - or series of communities - ranging from BMX bikers to couriers, pro athletes to commuters.

The history of bikes in film is a long and distinguished one, ranging from classics such as Vittorio de Sica's 1948 neorealist Bicycle Thieves, to arthouse shorts (Ridley Scott made his debut with one, Boy and Bicycle, back in 1965). But the arrival of the dedicated film festival - not just Barbur's but independents such as those in Leicester and Edinburgh - has encouraged more film-makers than ever before to take to the saddle.

The London festival - which takes over both screens at the Barbican from October 1 to 4 - includes a Saturday night programme of urban bike shorts featuring 14 films, all but one of them made in the past two years.

Among them are music videos, such as UK director Dougal Wilson's award-winning What's a Girl to Do, made in 2007 for Bat for Lashes, mini-documentaries, and a couple of Italian excursions into the cycling surreal. In one, "cyclist of the impossible" Giuliano Calore assails some of Europe's steepest mountain roads playing different musical instruments as he goes, while in another, 3,000 wanton revellers celebrate the possibility of "slow" cycling by eating, drinking and making merry while wobbling along for three miles through northern Italy.

Does the world really need so many bike films? The growth of niche festivals suggests that it does, and with more than a week to go until the start of this year's London outing, tickets are selling quickly. First to sell out was the Friday night programme featuring the UK premiere of David Deal and David Cooper's Road to Roubaix, a 75-minute account of the bone-rattling Paris-Roubaix race - reputedly the world's most taxing one-day competition - which, since 1896, has taken its riders over 160 miles of cobbled farm roads in northern France. Road to Roubaix, with its accompanying shorts featuring Craig MacLean, David Millar and Marco Pantani, is targeted at the seriously sporty cyclist (if those names don't mean anything, you probably wouldn't want to see it).

It's true that Barbur's Bicycle film festival does seem more hardcore than some, in keeping with its origins as a "courier-based festival" - and one couldn't imagine it extending its remit to Spielberg's ET or Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête, as Leicester did this summer. But in art as in life, the power of the bicycle lies in its adaptability to all sorts of lifestyles. Like Groucho Marx, it's never going to belong to a club.

I'm not personally a fan of the short film, though I rather like the idea of seeing 14 different ones in a sitting. Then again, one of the most entrancing artworks I ever saw was a film by Glaswegian artist Roddy Buchanan featuring four minutes of aerial coverage of the 1998 Tour de France on a continuous loop, which made the cyclists look like a stream of Damien Hirst dots. Being an art installation, it's probably stuck in a rich connoisseur's vault, which is no place for a bicycle to be. Perhaps Barbur could track it down and give it the fresh air it deserves.